Iran's Naval Mines: The IED of the Seas

Earlier this year Iran threatened to shut down shipping in the enormously important Strait of Hormuz. Now the U.S. and other nations are worried about something else: that Iran could mine the body of water with improvised devices.

Any ship can be a minesweeper—once. So goes the gallows humor referring to the threat that naval mines pose to ships.

But that sardonic phrase underlies a more pressing reality: In recent months, the United States and other countries have grown increasingly concerned about Iran's ability to mine the Strait of Hormuz, essentially cutting off a critical international waterway. Iran's leadership has already threatened to shut down the international shipping route, while also crowing about its growing fleet of mini submarines that are difficult to detect and can be used to lay mines.

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The problem with mines at sea, as with roadside bombs on land, is that they can be fairly easy to build but difficult to detect and clear. "You take an existing bomb and fit it with target detection, and voila! your bomb is now a mine," says Scott Truver, a naval consultant who has written extensively on mine warfare.

Like their land-based counterparts, even crude mines can be costly and deadly. Mine warfare experts like to cite the case of the USS Samuel B. Roberts, a frigate that struck an Iranian-laid mine in 1988. The warship didn't sink, but the mine, based on a Russian model from 1908, caused nearly $100 million in damage.

In fact, some naval officials are already talking about mines as the next improvised explosive device threat. "We've been there before, we just called it an IED," Rear Adm. Frank Morneau, deputy director for Expeditionary Warfare Division, told an audience at a naval conference earlier this year.

The Navy maintains a "triad" of capabilities to battle mines, which includes ships, aircraft, and divers. It also employs dolphins, whose echolation—the biological equivalent of sonar—is still one the most effective ways for finding and clearing certain mines. Like bomb dogs on land, the dolphins are actually sent to locate the mines (the marine mammals can also place a charge on the mines to destroy it). The push now, though, is to develop unmanned systems—drones in the sea—that can hunt down and neutralize the mines while keeping humans away from the threat.

The Navy recently unveiled a model of Knifefish, an unmanned submarine that would be used to hunt mines, but it won't be ready for use until at least 2015. The Navy has reportedly purchased dozens of SeaFox drones to target Iran's underwater mines. In another effort, AAI, a business unit of Textron, is hoping to sell the U.S. Navy its own unmanned surface ship that uses a command and control system based on the Shadow unmanned aerial vehicle, which has been used extensively by the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan. The company says it's already demonstrated mine detection capabilities and is hoping to win U.S. navy business.

But for any immediate threat, the Navy will have to rely on its existing technology to clear mines, and that's probably why it's hoping that politics—rather than technology—will ultimately stave off the mine threat. Truver says that Iran mining the Strait of Hormuz would be regarded as act of war and would likely cause immediate retaliation. "They would not put many weapons in the water," he says—maybe a handful before the United States and other countries would likely intervene.

Perhaps to emphasize that point the U.S. Navy last month took part in a military exercise in the Persian Gulf that involved over 30 other nations' naval forces. Though officially the mine clearing exercise was not aimed at Iran, it was intended to send a strong signal to the country's leadership.

Retired Navy Capt. Robert O'Donnell, who was involved for many years in mine warfare, says that the exercise clearly sent a signal to Iran that the international community was ready to act together but added that he still hopes the next exercise will focus more on the actual clearing of mines. "The emphasis [this time] was not on hunting or clearing mines," says O'Donnell, who attended the exercise. "The emphasis was on resolve and communication."